Fuel cell stacks include multiple individual fuel cells stacked to provide an electrical series relationship between individual cells. Fuel cell stacks further include end cells that act to terminate the stacked cells series relationships in opposing electrical poles, i.e. direct current positive and direct current negative end cells.
Individual cells of a fuel cell stack are generally produced with two major opposing surfaces that are substantially parallel to one another with a high degree of precision so that compression forces from the compression system are uniformly distributed to all of the major surfaces of each fuel cell of the fuel cell stack. However, in stacks containing a high number of fuel cells, major-surface parallelism tolerance accumulation can result in substantial non-parallelism at the terminal end cells of the fuel cell stack.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a fuel cell end plate for fuel cell stacks. It is a particular object of certain examples to provide a fuel cell end plate that is capable of complying with the shifting non-parallelism of the fuel cell stack while uniformly transmitting the compressive forces to the major surfaces of the end cells of fuel cell stack.